The Mirror in Our Music release party | June 4, 7 p.m. | Shadowbox Studio, Durham
Side A: Music You Can See
When Fred Joiner was a kid in the ’80s, his father was a house musician at Philly soul hot spot Sigma Sound Studios.
“Basically any music that came out of Philadelphia, if there was trombone, my dad was probably on it,” Joiner says, sitting in his book-stuffed living room in Carrboro. At age 51, the former Carrboro poet laureate finally has his own tome in the stacks: The Mirror in Our Music, a collection recently published by Raleigh small press Birds, LCC.
“My father has a very distinctive sound,” Joiner goes on, in his soft, warm, even rasp. “He once told me, ‘You want to play the center of the note.’” His parents happen to be in the next room, a kitchen full of yellow balloons from his younger daughter’s 10th birthday. “The emotional center. When you hear a musician who’s hitting it, it’s transformative.”
Like father, like son. The poems in The Mirror in Our Music are spare and elemental, seldom longer than a few etched stanzas. Restlessly broken lines snap and curl on the page, like reliefs on a gallery wall. Spacing guides the eye, not the breath.
“I view my poems as a visual art as much as a literary art,” Joiner says. “A lot of what I do is collage.”
Reading straight across, one poem, “On why Duke did not win the Pulitzer Prize in Music,” clearly pursues its theme: “perhaps because / some note / refuse to be flattened / some only exist / in the hot moment, / the crash / of breath & bone.” But the lines are riven in two columns, pulling the eye downward, hinting at secret mazes of meaning.
The writing dazzles, but The Mirror in Our Music contains so much more. Joiner encrusts his poetry with color photos, drawings, essays, epigraphs, and annotations. Done up in square trim like a vinyl record, the book has an A-side, which grew out of Joiner’s graduate-school thesis. You flip it for the B-side, which features his ekphrastic writing—poetry responding to other works of art—an interest he curates on his website Black Ekphrastic. The B-side crackles with vernacular photographs from an Ackland Art Museum exhibit and powerful self-portraits by photographer Ewané Samuel Nja Kwa.
“What do I want people to know about me?” Joiner considered while assembling the collection. “Well, I want them to know that I have a love for African diasporic culture and music, and that I’m adept at collaboration—that I’m open.”
So the book is about jazz and moves like jazz. It’s about the mysteries of art, how “the grayscale song of a camera’s / eye says what our words cannot.” It’s an atlas of everywhere Joiner has lived or visited, from the nation’s capital to North Carolina, Ireland to Africa; an ode to every artist, teacher, and ancestor that made a mark on him—the ones he makes marks for.
Most of all, it’s a hymn to community and collaboration. Almost every page is to, for, or about another person, or intimately dialoguing with their art.
“There was a lot of ground to cover and people to include, and I think that’s the heart of it,” says Chris Tonelli, the founder of Birds, LLC. “Fred is a selfless, generous, open human being, and the book is ultimately a thank-you note—not an opportunity to shine a light on his own work, but to lift up his friends and family and the artists who have shaped him.”
“Poetry, for me, is about the people who’ve poured into me,” Joiner says. “This book doesn’t happen without music. It doesn’t happen without art. It doesn’t happen without any of that.”
Side B: The Man in the Mirror
Joiner published his first poem in the magazine of his Quaker middle school. All he remembers is that it was called “Gabriel’s Horn.” Each contributor also included a poem that inspired them, and he chose a spoken-word piece called “Silenced” by the straight-edge hardcore band Uniform Choice.
Punk rock was his bedrock then—as a church kid in suburban New Jersey, as a high schooler at a rigorous college-prep academy in Connecticut, and as a dazzled newcomer to Washington, D.C. Bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat went with his passion for skateboarding. It’s easy to picture him hammering handrails, his stance low and rolling like a boxer’s.
“My parents are going to hear this, but I’m sure they know,” Joiner says. “We would get on the train and go into Philly to skate, and they had all-ages, middle-of-the-day punk rock shows.” The genre’s epigrammatic defiance still lingers below the blue notes and improvisatory flights of his poems: “hands up do not / always mean surrender, / sometimes it is a call to arms.”
Living in D.C. blew his world open. Studying math at American University, he buried himself in poetry and art classes and the cultural life of the city.
“I would go to readings, slams, open mics, art shows, everything,” he remembers. “I would go to a hip-hop open mic and the next day be at the Folger Shakespeare Library.”
Here, Joiner and his friend Jati Lindsay founded a website called Divine Cipher to promote poetry and music events. It grew popular enough that The Roots, whom they followed around like Deadheads, once recognized them in line at a New York show and pulled them to the front.
At a Nikky Finney reading on U Street, Joiner made a lifelong friend in the poet and children’s book author Tony Medina, who wrote the introduction to Joiner’s book.
“He was responsible for making me share my work out in the world,” Joiner says. Medina was just a few years older but occupied the role of a mentor: hailed as the heir apparent of the Black Arts Movement, freshly appointed as a creative writing professor at Howard University.
“We called Fred ‘Da Mayor,’” says Medina, speaking by phone from D.C. “He was one of those people who was everywhere and connected everybody together. He started crashing my class, and then he put the word out, and everyone started crashing my class. That’s how serious he was about poetry—but he was also serious about jazz.”
“[Fred’s book] is like the tire on the bicycle has all these different spokes coming out of it—personal stuff, social stuff, political stuff. But the center of the wheel is always the music.”
Tony Medina, writer
Of his friend’s book, Medina says, “It’s like the tire on the bicycle has all these different spokes coming out of it—personal stuff, social stuff, political stuff. But the center of the wheel is always the music.”
When Joiner moved to North Carolina in 2016, he was a well-established curator in D.C. He had brought major writers to his Intersections reading series, with Jon West-Bey of the American Poetry Museum, and worked with institutions like the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. He also wrote an essay on “learning to look and see” for the Phillips Collection’s centennial catalog. “I’m an extrovert and outgoing,” Joiner says. “The poetry gave me something to pour myself into and perform and render.”
He’d also lived in Mali from 2013 to 2016, which planted many roots that flourish in The Mirror in Our Music, starting with the striking covers by artist Amadou Sanogo. His wife Melanie Joiner’s antimalarial work had taken them to Bamako while he was completing his creative writing MFA in a low-residency program at Lesley University.
Today, Joiner sits on the Carrboro Town Council, the latest in a string of civic engagements.
When Melanie’s job brought them here in 2016, Joiner hit the ground running. At the West End Poetry Festival, Carrboro poet laureate Gary Phillips took a shine to him. Soon, Joiner was serving on both the Carrboro Poets’ Council and the Orange County Arts Commission’s artist advisory board, and Phillips urged him to apply for poet laureate.
His tenure (2019–22) was constrained by COVID-19, but it had a big impact: Joiner received a laureate fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. The same went to North Carolina poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green, former Maryland laureate Grace Cavalieri, and Adrian Matejka, Joiner’s mentor from his MFA program.
“It was the perfect convergence,” Joiner says. “My new life in North Carolina, my graduate school life, and my life in the D.C. metropolitan area were all converging in this fellowship. I’m glad that Miss Jaki and I were on it together.”
So the story isn’t why Joiner’s first book is being published now—it’s why it took so long.
“Self-doubt. Imposter syndrome. Battling the blank page, man, it’s a fight,” Joiner says. “I think being in North Carolina changed that, because people I thought very highly of were looking to me as a resource. I started to think about the tradition of Black poetry, and how would I honor my teachers if I didn’t showcase what they taught me? So I started to gather all the things that fed me. This is the community that created this poet that created this book.”
Fred Joiner doesn’t just live and breathe music, poetry, and art; he deeply respects them, and he had to be sure he could rise to meet the reverence he holds them in. “Miles Davis had this thing he said,” he offers. “It takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”
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